The Garden of Eden is in North London and is called Hampstead Heath, an urban garden legendaryly associated with Keats and romantic poets. Although more than a park is an urban forest, dotted with thirty ponds. Three of them are open to bathers all year. One is mixed, another is for men and another for women, an anachronism that survives against all odds as the best British traditions.
The decision to allow transsexuals in the women's pond (the most paradisiacal, protected against voyeurs) led to loud protests last summer. In 2018 there was also a loud raid of 10 women, disguised with false beards, claiming their right to use the men's pond (the widest and the most open).
Men and women, together but not scrambled, comfort each other in the mixed pond: the smallest, tight and dirty, and yet the most frequented, with kilometer tails as the thermometer approaches 30 degrees (the penultimate week July reached 38, on the hottest and stickiest day ever recorded).
Until recently, the Hampstead Heath ponds were London's best secret. Legend has it that Katharine Hepburn visited them at a time, and that she entertained lifeguards with tea and pastries before taking a dip. Emma Thompson and Kate Moss are among their most recent clientele (two pounds of "donation", although many people enter for free).
At the cinema, the ponds rose to fame in a scene from El mole, with Gary Oldman poking his head in the brownish waters. A recent documentary, The ponds, has put them back in the spotlight, with protagonists hitherto anonymous such as Tim Kearney, a man who was hit 10 years ago by a bus on Oxford Street and has recovered thanks to the "miraculous water" and almost Frozen in January and February, the months reserved for true immersion fans. Kearney also comes to take a Christmas dip.
Dan Norton, 48, is one of those who dare since April, "when the water reaches 15 degrees and you don't have that feeling that the balls are going to freeze." Dan would not mind sharing the biggest pond with women, but he acknowledges that "only men" have a deterrent effect, and that being able to sunbathe in hides in the middle of the city "is an unpayable gift" (that laxity also serves as a claim for gay couples , especially in the late afternoon).
The "Forbidden passage to men, children, radio and dogs" sign in the meantime looks at the entrance to the women's pond, near Kenwood Palace. “It is a magical space, with incredible privacy, to the point that the topless has been allowed since 1976,” writes Esther Freud in At the Pond, which gathers the experiences of the privileged users of the female pond. "You get there, you give the towel, and all you see around is trees and sky."
«The lake of women paradise, the garden of Eden», says another regular, the Spanish Nela Domenech, who lives five minutes by bicycle and does not just believe the privilege. «Besides submerging myself in the water, I like to read or listen to music in the grass. Maintaining segregation I like (I've never seen a Muslim in burkini) because it builds trust among users . There are women of all types, sizes, measures, figures and shapes, so that nobody has a complex of anything: from a Barbie woman to the wicked witch ».
And there are tansexuals too, although only occasionally, and riding some occasional commotion: «These days there was what I saw as a laughing man with a yellow bikini that caused me some curiosity, because the only female indicator I wore was precisely the bikini ».
Nela attests to the therapeutic effect of the ponds, and ensures that a friend achieved a "friendly divorce" because here she managed to release all the tension shed. Another friend always goes for a liberating dip every time she passes small children to her ex.
Of course, the swimsuit is sometimes blackened "by a green or brown fluff from the water", something that does not happen in the lake of men - much more open and suitable for strokes - although it also occurs in the mixed pond, where The water is sometimes almost muddy.
There, he occasionally works as a lifeguard Jed Hackman, who prefers the varied environment and the whitish skin of the girls to the hairy monotony of the male pond, where he once had to launch with the canoe to arrive in time to rescue a swimmer who suffered a cramp : «It was in the middle of June, in one of those cold summers in which one could not go out into the street in a short sleeve. Everything is changing now: I don't know if it's climate change. Sometimes too many people come here. The real paradise must be found now in Lake Beckenham, in the south of London, which has just been enabled for bathers. But don't say it too loud.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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